AI in a Nutshell - Week 42 - Chips, Cancer Breakthroughs, and AI Getting a Bit Too Human
OpenAI is designing its own AI chips, DeepMind’s AI might help beat cancer, ChatGPT will soon allow adult content, Google’s Veo 3.1 makes scary-real videos, and Elon Musk wants Grok to personalize you
Fellow human, it’s week 41. AI hasn’t taken over the world yet. And here’s your lazy-man version of what went down in the AI world in the past week.
What You Must Know
Note: You can click the title to read more on the subject.
AI Is Stealing Wikipedia’s Traffic → Wikipedia says traffic is dropping because people get quick answers from AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity instead. It’s clear people now want summaries, not sources. Just like what happened with Stack Overflow.
DeepMind’s AI Finds a Promising Cancer Drug → DeepMind’s AI analyzed thousands of compounds and discovered one that could make certain deadly cancers more treatable. It’s still early, but the results are free for researchers to test. A hopeful confirmation of my belief that AI’s biggest wins might not be in chatbots but in labs.
ChatGPT Will Allow Adult Content for Verified Users → Sam Altman said ChatGPT will soon allow verified adults to write or share erotic stories. Not sure if ‘verified’ means we’ll have to upload ID; I guess we’ll find out.
OpenAI Builds Its Own AI Chips → OpenAI is teaming up with Broadcom to make custom AI chips so it doesn’t depend entirely on Nvidia. Sam Altman even bragged that this could be key to OpenAI’s next big leap.
Grok AI Will Personalize Your X Feed → Elon Musk says Grok will soon analyze millions of posts to create a customized feed for every user. Someone like me will even be able to block entire topics like politics. Can’t wait.
Windows 11 Gets a Smarter Copilot → Microsoft added deeper AI features to Windows 11. I don’t use Microsoft, but I hope it’s nothing like Google’s AI integration into its suite, which, frankly, is underwhelming.
What’s Good to Know
Note: You can click the title to read more on the subject.
Anthropic Introduces “Agent Skills” → Anthropic quietly rolled out Skills - small, reusable modules that teach AI agents specific tasks.
Perplexity Adds Language Learning Mode → Perplexity’s new interactive language-learning feature lets you chat naturally in another language with built-in corrections. If you’re familiar with Duolingo, yeah, this is just like its smarter cousin.
Apple’s AI Search Lead Joins Meta → Apple’s top AI search executive just jumped ship to Meta.
OpenAI Tests Shared Prompts for Teams → OpenAI is testing a new feature that allows teams to share ChatGPT prompts internally.
Make Your Own Mini ChatGPT for $100 → Andrej Karpathy on X shared open code for building a mini ChatGPT using cheap cloud compute. The total cost is around $100. It can chat, do math, and write poems.
AI Tools Worth Knowing
Supermail → Turns inbox chaos into clarity with AI.
Smodin → Detect or bypass AI-written content.
Scorecard → Evaluate and optimize enterprise AI agents.
Caspa → AI product photography and videos for ecommerce.
Receiptor → Auto-extract receipts and invoices from your email.
Kaizen Corner - What Are “Vector Databases,” and Why Are They Suddenly Everywhere?
A vector database helps AI remember meaning, not just words.
Here’s the simple version: AI turns everything: text, images, even sounds, into a list of numbers called vectors. These numbers represent meaning. For example, “king” and “queen” end up with similar numbers because they’re related, while “banana” sits far away.
A vector database stores these numbers so AI can quickly find things with similar meaning, not just exact matches. That’s how ChatGPT, search engines, and recommendation tools can “understand” context and pull up smart results.
They’re everywhere now because modern AI apps need memory, not word-for-word memory, but idea memory. And vector databases are how they pull that trick off.
Meme of the Week
That’s your week in AI.
If you learned something, tell a friend. And if you didn’t, blame yourself.
Until next Sunday,
Kay - your fellow human
P.S. If this email lands in spam, that’s your inbox trying to stop you from staying plugged in. Fix it.